New Riddles

"The modern world was not alive to the tremendous Reality that encompassed it. We were surrounded by an immeasurable abyss of darkness and splendor. We built our empires on a pellet of dust revolving around a ball of fire in unfathomable space. Life, that Sphynx, with the human face and the body of a brute, asked us new riddles every hour. Matter itself was dissolving under the scrutiny of Science; and yet, in our daily lives, we were becoming a race of somnambulists, whose very breathing, in train and bus and car, was timed to the movement of the wheels; and the more perfectly, and even alertly, we clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the more complete was our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery that anything should be in existence at all."

- Alfred Noyes (1880 - 1958) 

An incandescent light, Extinguished

"Each morning when I wake up you offer me twenty-four brand new hours to cherish and enjoy your beauty. You gave birth to every miraculous form of life. Your children include the clear lake, the green pine, the pink cloud, the snowcapped mountain top, the fragrant forest, the white crane, the golden deer, the extraordinary caterpillar, and every brilliant mathematician, skilled artisan, and gifted architect. You are the greatest mathematician, the most accomplished artisan, and the most talented architect of all. The simple branch of cherry blossoms, the shell of a snail, and the wing of a bat all bear witness to this amazing truth. My deep wish is to live in such a way that I am awake to each of your wonders and nourished by your beauty. I cherish your precious creativity and I smile to this gift of life."

- Thich Nhat Hanh (1926 - 2022)
Love Letter to Earth

Postscript. A bit over a dozen years ago I mourned the loss of Zen Buddhist roshi (and gifted photographer) John Daido Loori. I now mourn the passing of another Zen Buddhist master, Thich Nhat Hanh, whose physical pattern dissipated into the eternal mystery on Jan 22, 2022. Thây (as he was known by his followers, which is Vietnamese for teacher), may not have been a photographer, but he radiated an incandescent light of such spiritual intensity that no camera was ever needed.

"We have a lamp inside us. The oil of the lamp is our breathing, our steps, and our peaceful smile. Our practice is to light the lamp." - Thich Nhat Hanh

Fragmentated Wholes

"As has been seen, fragmentation originates in essence in the fixing of the insights forming our overall self-world view, which follows on our generally mechanical, routinized, and habitual modes of thought about these matters. Because the primary reality goes beyond anything that can be contained in such fixed forms of measure, these insights must eventually cease to be adequate, and will thus give rise to various forms of unclarity or confusion. However, when the whole field of measure is open to original and creative insight, without any fixed limits or barriers, then our overall world views will cease to be rigid, and the whole field of measure will come into harmony, as fragmentation within it comes to an end. But original and creative insight within the whole field of measure is the action of the immeasurable. For when such insight occurs, the source cannot be within ideas already contained in the field of measure but rather has to be in the immeasurable, which contains the essential formative cause of all that happens in the field of measure. The measurable and the immeasurable are then in harmony and indeed one sees that they are both ways of considering the one and undivided whole."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Harmonious Unit in Itself

"There is not a
fragment in all nature,
for every relative fragment
of one thing is a full
harmonious unit in itself."

- John Muir (1838 - 1914)

 

Kandinskian Cacophonies - Part II

"It seems to me that we live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherent, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherent. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like."

-  William Golding (1911 - 1993)

Postscript. Regular followers of my blog will have noticed by now my recent focus on "leaves in ice"  abstract-like compositions. Of course, most of this has to do with the fact that the seasonal weather (in northern VA) has just not allowed any other kind of photography. But another important reason is that the morning walks my wife and I have been regularly taking through our neighborhood since the start of the (seemingly, never ending) pandemic have over time uncovered a kind of aesthetic bestiary that I've learned to both appreciate and revel in. Quiet little scenes that would normally be "invisible" (literally, since there are parts of our neighborhood I've rarely been in before we started our walks) have gradually revealed themselves - and their compositional possibilities - to me; microcosms of an ethereal beauty all their own. I hesitated taking "real" photographs for a long while (apart from a few quick snapshots with my iPhone). While the natural galleries of haphazardly arranged Kandinskian forms and colors  mesmerized and fascinated me (and, obviously, have continued to do so), I was unsure of my ability to find compositions in such "busy and confusing" cacophonous worlds. But after each walk ended, and my work day got started, I soon noticed myself thinking more and more about lost opportunities. And so, eventually, inevitably, I succumbed to the creative process. I embraced the cacophony. These kinds of compositions - in which multiple elements (mostly form and color; less so, luminance) compete for attention - have never come easily to me, but when they work, they are very satisfying 😊. This is also one of those times that I especially miss my dad, the artist, without whom - and without whose aesthetic sage wisdom - I have now been for 20 years (as of this March). His eye for these kinds of compositions was second to none, with perhaps Kandinsky being the sole exception (and to whose art the New York Times once traced my dad's aesthetic lineage).

Kandinskian Delights

"In nature nothing is perfect and everything is perfect."

- Alice Walker (1944 - )

"There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture—that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within."

- William Kingdon Clifford (1845 - 1879)

Postscript. There is a small swale (the depression is no more than 6 feet by 10) in the front yard of one of our neighbors that inevitably traps a pool of water after a rain. And whenever a rainfall is followed by a night with sufficiently-less-then-freezing temperatures this "depression with water" turns into a veritable paradise of Kandinskian-composition-like delights! Camera-in-hand (whenever I remember to take it!), I always eagerly rush over to this humble aesthetic oasis as my wife and I set out on our morning walk through our neighborhood. And it never disappoints. Always, there are compositions galore! Quiet unassuming harmonies of contrasting shapes and colors; which for me is what the best (certainly, the most enjoyable spur-of-the-moment) photography is all about 😊

Nature's Simplicity

"I should like to propose that we look at this element of freshness, of newness, of strangeness, as a thread along which to place the activities of the consciously creative artist, the conscious patron and critic of the creative artist, and the common man — common in the sense that he has no specified part in creation or criticism. If we make one criterion for defining the artist (as distinct from the craftsman and the trained but routine performer of dance, drama, or music) the impulse to make something new, or to do something in a new way — a kind of divine discontent with all that has gone before, however good — then we can find such artists at every level of human culture, even when performing acts of great simplicity."

 - Margaret Mead (1901 - 1978)